Do Not Lose Heart

Last week Jim and I went to see the movie ‘One Battle After Another’ – it’s a fascinating movie, very thought provoking and complicated. It’s about all kinds of things, but one of the things seems to be about never giving up. In hard times, we are tempted to despair; we might think nothing is ever getting better; but we have to keep hoping anyway, one battle after another. It’s not at all a religious movie, but that message caught my attention. Hope is part of our faith. We need to hope, and we need to teach our young people to hope. It’s something human beings need to survive. (I think we have an epidemic of hopelessness in our world today, one of the roots of all the extreme violence we’re seeing on all sides.)

So Jesus told a parable, about the need to pray always and not to lose heart.

The story itself is simple: a widow is seeking justice for some wrong. Sometimes a widow is a symbol of powerlessness in these stories, but this widow isn’t staying powerless. She comes to complain regularly about what’s been done to her. But the judge she seeks justice from ignores her. He’s a bad judge, a person who ‘neither fears God nor has respect for people.’ But since the widow keeps coming at him over and over again, he gets sick of her, and he figures he’d be better off settling her case and getting her off his back. So he does. The judge isn’t changed by the widow’s persistence – he’s as unpleasant at the end as he is at the beginning – but her perseverance pays off and gets her what she wants. 

So, this is sort of a story of the way things are, of powerlessness meets power and what might happen there. Faced with injustice and hardship, we need to keep pressing for what’s right. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. But Luke says it’s more than that. It’s ‘about the need to pray always and not to lose heart.’ And wrapping up the parable, Jesus says, ‘and will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? …when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?’

Now, the Parables Bible study might remember that this was one of the more unsatisfying parables we discussed. We don’t know what cause the widow is pressing, we don’t know anything about her character and whether she’s a good person, all we know is that the judge is a bad judge. It very well might be two wicked people suing each other in court, for all we really know.

But it’s even more unsatisfying if we try to make either of the characters a stand-in for God, or for how we’re supposed to be with God. That’s one of those interpretations that kind of falls apart the more you explore it. It seems we’re supposed to draw a comparison between God and this judge, but that sounds something like, God will seem to be ignoring you just like the bad judge in this story, but if you ask and ask and ask, eventually you’ll get what you want because you’ll wear God out – and that is the definition of faith. Not a comforting thought. And yet it does strike a chord, somehow – because prayer is a practice that does sometimes feel like we’re pressing our case over and over again, and the response can definitely take a long time coming. In dark times, hope can feel hard to hold onto. All of us has been there – maybe even now.

Sometimes in our faith journey we really do feel the immensity of God’s giving to us. We have times when the warmth of God’s presence is wonderful, overwhelming, breathing into us fuller and richer life. We feel and name our blessings, we pray and we know God is there, like God is sitting there next to us in the room. Other times, though, we might not feel much of anything. We might be trying to pray, but not getting any sense of God there with us. We might be desperate for a healing, and nothing happens. We might be seeking God’s direction for our lives, but just feel stuck in our muddle. We might ask and ask and never hear a response.

Spiritual writers through the centuries have named this – the experience of spiritual dryness, what John of the Cross called the dark night of the soul. It is, they say, a sign of maturing in the faith, paradoxically enough – God might encourage us at first with all the delights of spiritual consolation, but in order to draw us on and mature us, God withdraws a little bit. We have to walk a few steps on our own feet instead of being carried – it’s the only way we learn to walk. Don’t worry about feeling God’s presence all the time, in other words. Our salvation depends on God’s grace, not on the goodies we might receive – we can trust God to be good no matter what we’re feeling.

But if it can’t guarantee us an answer, just what is prayer for, anyway? Well, partly, it is simply about us. Prayer is good for us to do. There have been a lot of studies in the last few decades about habits, and how we form them – when we repeat an action over and over again, pathways are laid in our brain and the action becomes wired into us. Once we form the habit, we do it without consciously thinking about what we’re doing, and our brains are freed up to think about other things. This applies not just to physical habits or learning a new skill, but also to habits of thought – we can train ourselves to break through destructive thoughts and emotions. Do something enough, and it literally shapes us and becomes part of us.

Prayer is one of those habits that shapes us. I’ve seen it in myself, and maybe you’ve seen it for yourselves too: The more I pray, the more I become a different kind of person. When I pray regularly, I’m more able to trust, less anxious and more at ease with uncertainty. I spend a lot less time churning over the same old thoughts in my head. I’m more inclined to hope, even when things get bad. And I’m readier to give and serve others in need. I see this even more in the truly amazing spiritual greats I’ve met over the course of my ministry, people who are well on their way in all this, shining God’s love through their lives. In my still extremely limited, very flawed and human way, when I pray, I get a tinier bit more like that, a little bit closer to how Jesus showed us to live. Which is, we’re taught, what it means to be a Christian, a follower of Jesus.

We do need more hope in this world, and we need to show and model more hope, as Jesus people. It doesn’t mean it’s easy. As one preacher put it, ‘faith is the willed determination that God can be relied upon.’ Sometimes, maybe a lot of the time, we have to will ourselves to hope and trust, even when we don’t feel it. But to persevere in prayer, to continue to show up, leads us further and further into hopefulness.

‘Jesus told this parable about our need to pray always and not to lose heart.’ This is not a parable about the nature of God. This is a parable about us, and what it's like to live the life of faith in this world. God is always ready to give, always working for justice. Praying our way into hope means not simply yearning for God’s help, but becoming people of new life and new hope ourselves – people who give easily and who do justice for all, people of light to chase away the darkness around us. That is what Christian faith is, that is the hope we are called to in this world and the next.